In this week's episode, Ben and Chris discuss the Surton founder story. They've been building Surton for two and a half years and have learned a ton of lessons. They discuss their both unique perspectives as first and second-time founders and share their wisdom gained throughout the process. Intro and Outro music is https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Lazy_Salon/Invisible_Like_Peace/07_Chips_Folly by LAZY SALON and is licensed under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0 ..read more

In this week's episode, Ben and Chris discuss the role of deadlines in engineering. Often feared and often missed, but deadlines play a crucial role in business and delivering value to customers. They talk about how to marry the needs of the engineering team to the needs of the executive team in a business and strategies for both sides. Intro and Outro music is https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Lazy_Salon/Invisible_Like_Peace/07_Chips_Folly by LAZY SALON and is licensed under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0 ..read more

In this week's episode, Ben and Chris share their opinions and experience building with full serverless technologies in AWS. They talk through the pros, cons and learnings from using the latest in-vogue tech stack. Intro and Outro music is https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Lazy_Salon/Invisible_Like_Peace/07_Chips_Folly by LAZY SALON and is licensed under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0 ..read more

In this week's episode, Ben and Chris discuss the rewrite. Typically, as a software solution finds business success, technical debt stacks up over time and eventually the concept of "We just need to start over" comes up as a dream, and potentially in some companies a reality. The problem is that it often turns into a nightmare. Things You Should Never Do, Part I - Joel on Software - https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/ Intro and Outro music is https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Lazy_Salon/Invisible_Like_Peace/07_Chips_Folly by LAZY SALON and is license ..read more

In this week's episode, Ben and Chris discuss internal company documentation at Surton and how they have found success building a company wiki using Microsoft's Loop. They also discuss other popular tools in this space such as Notion and Confluence. Intro and Outro music is ⁠“Chip’s Folly”⁠ by LAZY SALON and is licensed under ⁠CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 ..read more

In this episode, Ben and Chris discuss how they helped a client "lift and shift" 40 servers from a data center into Microsoft's Azure. They discuss how they accomplished this in a tight time window, opportunities for the client to upgrade the application slowly over time after the migration was completed and how to approach hard problems. Intro and Outro music is “Chip’s Folly” by LAZY SALON and is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 ..read more

In this episode, Ben & Chris bring on their first guest - Mike Storey. Mike has worked in the software industry for over 40 years. The guys discuss Mike’s career experience and insights, discuss runbooks in a Q&A back and forth as well as discuss Mike’s passion - the thing he spends most of his time on these days – the Agile Learning Institute. To learn more about the Agile Learning Institute visit https://agile-learning.institute/ or email Mike at mike@agile-learning.institute.   Intro and Outro music is “Chip’s Folly” by LAZY SALON and is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 ..read more

In this episode, Ben & Chris bring you a “war story from the field”. DevOps engineering is always one deployment or upgrade away from a crisis, and today’s story is one of a Kubernetes cluster gone sideways. They go over how they came up with a strategy to upgrade a cluster that was set to expire all certificates in a couple of days, the final solution and then some lessons learned along the way.   Intro and Outro music is “Chip’s Folly” by LAZY SALON and is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 ..read more

In this episode, Ben & Chris talk through their lessons learned as software developers, DevOps engineers and engineering leadership over 20+ years of building software. These lessons are things we've learned the hard way and ones we've come to live by at Surton. DRY but not too DRY Least complexity principle Code readability matters In human time – code is read more than executed Don’t drink the zealot’s Koolaid Don’t solve problems that don’t exist Analysis Paralysis Intro and Outro music is “Chip’s Folly” by LAZY SALON and is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 ..read more

In this episode, Ben & Chris talk in depth about building your very own “DevOps Control Center” in one of their favorite platforms, Retool. They discuss automating runbooks via custom internal applications quickly to maximize their return on investment.   Intro and Outro music is “Chip’s Folly” by LAZY SALON and is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 ..read more